Give and go: reasons to attend the Accidental Music Festival- November 8th -11th

While we don’t have an event in this year’s Accidental Music Festival, we’re supporting this event financially and otherwise. You can attend many of these events free of charge, but you can also become a patron for a historic and an almost outrageous series of music events in Orlando. Paid pass holders get reserved seating and loving glances from fellow patrons.

It’s year two for the guerrilla theater-like production of Orlando’s Accidental Music Festival, with its inaugural ten days trimmed to four starting on Thursday, November 8th. In one of the inaugural posts for this blog, the festival’s first year was likened to Project Thor killer tungsten poles hurtling in for an unannounced kill from low orbit. This year let’s liken AMF to the notion of the pop-up shop– possibly happening more times, but you’d better jump to this if you value the experiential moments. Since numbered lists seemed to work so well for one fortunate American in Denver recently, here is mine, as it relates to why you should give and go to this week’s Accidental Music Festival:

Many music festivals are primarily concerned about numbers of attendees and revenue and often make predictable and easily digestible choices regarding the aesthetic contour of the artists presented. John Cage’s prepared piano sonatas- broadly under the rubric of “classical” music- are worlds away from the function of a full symphony orchestra. Cage would have had it no other way. The same could be said for the experimental modern pop forms of Deerhoof. Each offering from the Accidental Music Festival falls most easily under the hammock of creative music.

2) Juan Trigos.

For the second year Maestro Trigos is a centerpiece of the Accidental Music Festival. This year he brings his own orchestra, playing modern North American compositions, including another of his own. While much of the intensity gets mediated by being crushed into the little box, this performance of his Ricercare VI de Camerata from last year was one of the recent profound musical moments for me:

3) The homer element.

Root, root, root for the home team- when they are ready for it. The first AMF saw UCF percussion professor Thad Anderson outside the confines- a geographically decentralized major university and well-hidden cable channel- performing a new electro-acoustic solo percussion work. Dan Jordan and Michael Welch channeled decades of mutual work and possibly built us an Orlando exquisite corpse based on Coltrane’s Interstellar Space. Central Florida Composers Forum (CF2 for you acronym-centric thugs) presents Ghost In The Machine– an entire program of electro-acoustic music including offerings from last year’s festival participants Keith Lay (increasingly prolific of late- check this), John Alvarez, and the fore-mentioned Thad Anderson.

4) Festival founder Christopher Belt is laying it all on the line.

He’s a cohort at our day job and I’ve watched him take some of the most difficult paths to create a unique cultural opportunity. Moving an orchestra from one country to another is a very large task for a festival without a built-in staff or lawyers. Tweeting about NBA games and his own preoccupation with pick up basketball games usurped by assembling a lovely and diverse cultural event for 2012.